Ryan McIntyre co-founded Excite as part of the original "Excite 6" at Stanford, launching one of the earliest web search engines and taking it public before the $6.7B @Home merger, giving him rare operator perspective from the first wave of internet search. He's also a lifelong musician with a full recording studio in his basement who describes music as his "meditation," and this personal passion directly influences his investment focus on human-computer interaction and new instrument-like interfaces, including his excitement about companies like ROLI Blocks that create new categories of expressive digital instruments.

• Focuses heavily on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and the specialized hardware needed to support it. A key interest is how computationally demanding workloads inevitably shift toward dedicated hardware, specifically pointing out that creating purpose-built silicon to accelerate transformer model inference is a massive upgrade over traditional graphics processing units.
• Plays the guitar and shares a deep ongoing passion for music and musicians. Actively contributes personal guitar recordings to ambient tracks produced by friends and frequently celebrates the birthdays of notable artists across multiple genres like John Mayer, Flea, Bob Weir, and Wayne Shorter, making music a perfect casual icebreaker.
• Champions practical technology applications and publicly celebrates the fundraising milestones of Foundry portfolio companies. Enjoys seeing startups solve real problems, pointing to specific innovations like bringing real-time translation to live events and acknowledging significant growth stages like a Series B funding round for autonomous data companies.